Harvest of Murder: A Gardening Mystery - Hardcover

It's perhaps the ultimate irony that men searching for the fountain of youth often end up dying young, and so it is with the victim in Ripley's latest botanically based mystery. Eminent ethnobotanist Professor Peter Whiting is murdered just as his discovery of the life-enhancing properties of a rare jungle plant is about to be made public, and his neighbor and friend, Louise Eldridge, is not convinced that it's the act of a local serial killer, as police would have her believe. On hiatus from her popular PBS-TV show, the gardening guru dons her pseudosleuth persona and goes undercover in the research lab, where Whiting's widow continues her husband's experiments. While Louise tends to the plants that hold the key to longer life, her own existence is endangered. With a flair for the dramatic combined with a comforting sense of the mundane, Ripley's Eldridge is both an intrepid inquisitor and a gossipy gardener in this tale of biotech intrigue. Carol Haggas
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A dog-walking professor friend of series sleuth and PBS-TV garden show host Louise Eldridge (The Garden Tour Affair) regales her with tales of his younger days in the Brazilian jungles. Just before his murder, however, he tells her of a good health-and-longevity plant he discovered there and has begun propagating for eventual commercial sale. Louise later works in his lab where various greedy suspects come trooping along so police actually ask for her "observations." Louise's subsequent sleuthing is tempered by plenty of familial banter, plant genetics information, and villainous machinations. An easy, pleasant read; for most collections.
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